Don’t be Caught Off Guard: Preparing for the Future with Predictive HR Analytics

Why Predictive HR Analytics?

Are you struggling to find the right people to hire? Are you finding that your current workforce planning process just isn’t cutting it? Predictive HR analytics may be the answer.

Predictive HR analytics is a data-driven approach to workforce planning that uses historical data to predict future trends.

The market is crystal clear. Record-low unemployment rates coupled with voluntary resignations at an all-time high, and these trends show no sign of slowing. The need for workforce planning isn’t a passing thought to address later- it’s time to take the appropriate steps today. If you haven’t addressed your future workforce just yet, you’re not alone. Implementation of workforce analytics continues to be a struggle for many organizations.

PwC found in their report: Preparing for the Workforce of Tomorrow, Today that most companies surveyed are struggling to make definitive decisions about their workforce. The adoption of workforce analytics was identified as one of the top 10 “at-risk” capabilities in identifying some of the top threats organizations face for the future.

Using data from the organization, predictive HR analytics provide a wealth of insights that can give businesses strategies for gauging future talent needs, experience needs, and eliminating potential biases in employee selection. Failure to understand the importance or implement the data into your workforce planning is a critical misstep.

How Can Predictive HR Analytics Help in the Workforce Planning Process?

It’s estimated that 40-60% of workers in large companies are not engaged in their jobs and only 20% of millennials feel fully engaged. If you want to fill positions with top talent, you need to be able to see where your workforce is heading.

Predictive HR analytics provides organizations with the data needed to make informed decisions about the future state of their workforces by identifying key drivers that influence people decisions today. Predictive HR analytics delivers insight into what employees are thinking, which teams are struggling, and which individuals are at risk.

How? PREDICTIVEHR’s Predictive Analytics leverage true Artificial Intelligence to gather data. It’s looking for things like data inconsistencies, patterns, and clues to the world around it, helping you explore and analyze vast amounts of unstructured data to gain clarity and understanding of the many factors influencing your enterprise and staff.

10 Ways Clean Data and Predictive HR Analytics Are Vital To Company Success

  • Predictive HR analytics gives you insights about possible trends in demand for specific skills from both internal sources and external sources so you can plan accordingly.
  • It helps eliminate bias when hiring by predicting how well candidates will perform on given tasks related to their position before they even come in for an interview.
  • For more senior positions, it can provide insights about future retirement intentions so you can plan for succession.
  • Predictive HR analytics is crucial when it comes to making data-driven decisions on workforce planning.
  • You can use these metrics to identify patterns in where people are moving within your organization and create job profiles that better fit the needs of your employees
  • Predictive HR analytics also allows you to create more diverse hiring pools so you can hire more effectively and efficiently.
  • You’ll be able to anticipate gaps before they occur, which is the best way to service your clients and customers.
  • When using predictive HR analytics, you’ll be able to identify potential layoffs, transfers, and resignations ahead of time so you can better prepare.
  • You’ll also be able to identify ways to keep your employees engaged.
  • Predictive HR analytics will help you find out how often candidates are turning down job offers from competitors.

Let’s dive into some of the most relevant opportunities for Talent Acquisition and Management leaders today:

Using Predictive HR Analytics to Identify Skills Gaps

New sectors are popping up in real-time, so new jobs and positions arrive to fill the needs. Gauging recruitment success on ‘number of roles filled’ is now meaningless. Companies able to identify the skill sets they need their ideal candidates to possess will now have a leg up on the companies that can only think to require a bachelor’s degree and 5+ years of experience.

Predictive HR analytics have evolved to provide companies with pertinent data instrumental in making hiring plans based on your top performers’ best attributes. Businesses that deploy that technology can then hire top talent based on fit and skill, ultimately leading to the best fit for the position.

Predictive HR analytics delivers insight into what employees are thinking, which teams are struggling, and which individuals are at risk.

Predictive models can help organizations measure:

  • The probability of an employee leaving or joining a team
  • Determine how key attributes influence job performance
  • Identify skill gaps in the current workforce
  • Predict turnover or burnout, and more
  • When an employee will be ready for promotion
  • The best time to approach them with a new position or offer
  • When they might leave or join another organization based on skills, experience
  • Whether or not they are satisfied in their current role.

Identifying the skills your workers need will not only help with recruitment efforts, but it’ll also help you determine whether or not you’re an attractive company.

Identifying skills gaps are also crucial for internal development as well. If you can identify the weak spots in your employee’s skill set, you can work to correct them in workforce training or continued education. This not only helps employee retention, but studies also show that type of investment in your team can also improve morale.

Using Predictive HR Analytics to Personalize the Work

Your employees can only separate their work and home lives so much. What happens at one will inevitably impact the other; we’re only human after all. This is particularly true when it comes to personalized experiences through social media, online purchases, and online entertainment. For example, Facebook always seems to show an ad for a product you were just talking about, and Netflix practically handpicks your next series addiction.

But why should this matter at work? It’s actually affecting the mentality of your workforce. Not just your employees specifically, but the entire workforce. In our home lives, customization is king. Society at large is becoming more demanding, and they are quite used to seeing those desires fulfilled. Is it any wonder that our society of immediate gratification is now seeping into the workforce? By identifying exactly what your employees want, you can create a culture that keeps them engaged.

Employees want that same engagement, customization, and experience replicated by their employer, not just by the brands they shop online. Unfortunately, employee surveys and exit interviews are historically unreliable. Predictive HR analytics bridges the gap.

By understanding the needs of your employees, you can create a better work environment that encourages engagement and thus growth in things like:

  • Benefit Packages
  • Management Sentiment
  • Compensation Structure
  • Culture and Teams
  • Work Environment
  • Learning and Development
  • Training and Onboarding
  • Interviewing Processes
  • Rewards and Recognition
  • Performance and Productivity

Your analytics can help enterprise leaders personalize the experience for each employee through skill development, promotional tracks, identifying pain points, etc. Imagine helping each individual on your team create real-time career mapping for their own unique journey. THAT is the immediate gratification they’re searching for. In fact, an overwhelming 86% of employees are more likely to stay with their current employers if they feel appreciated.

DYK? 89% of workers who say benefits are important would be less likely to change employers for a higher salary?

Predictive HR analytics provides organizations with the data needed to make informed decisions about the future state of their workforce by identifying key drivers that influence people decisions today.

Using Predictive HR Analytics to Take the Bias Out Of Your Hiring

Legitimate bias-free recruitment has been a challenge in every company. It’s an unfortunate, albeit a natural, part of human nature. The problem is bias is often unconscious, making it hard to address or identify, even within yourself. If we can be honest with ourselves, we can all admit we likely have a bias in some area while hiring, consciously or unconsciously.

The recruitment process can often be difficult, especially when it comes to eliminating bias. This is a natural part of human nature, but it can be challenging to address or identify unconscious bias.

It’s important to note that, used incorrectly, it is possible for predictive HR analytics and the AI on which they are based, to absorb human biases as well. Companies must take care in how they implement certain data solutions.

However, there are ways to overcome this obstacle. Data-based evidence can help to reduce the impact of bias during the recruitment process. For example, by studying the demographics of your workforce through predictive HR analytics and conducting blind resume reviews, you can help to ensure that you are hiring the best possible candidates, regardless of their background or personal history.

If implemented and monitored correctly, data-driven recruiting can be highly effective at removing bias, leaving only the best possible fit for your position. The solution possibilities span from predictive HR analytics to promote diversity to the use of “blind” screening to eliminate any bias pulled from someone’s physical appearance, whether gender, ethnicity, indicators of social background, etc.

Make Informed Decisions For Your Organization’s Future

Now that you understand the importance of predictive HR analytics in workforce planning, it’s time to take action. Implementing predictive HR analytics into your organization can help improve retention rates, create a more engaged workforce, and reduce the amount of time and money spent on recruitment efforts.

If you’re ready to make the switch to predictive HR analytics or want more information about how it can benefit your business, contact us today. Our team is happy to answer any questions and help get you started on making data-driven decisions about your workforce.

There’s no way around it; preparing for your future workforce requires action today. Companies that embrace our new reality and work with their employees to address the changes will thrive, while those who don’t will continue to struggle in this market. Stop being reactive and start being predictive. Contact PREDICTIVEHR for your free demo.

Talent Attraction: The Rules Have Changed, Are Your Recruiters Keeping Up?

At the onset of the global pandemic, talent literally left the building, and we’re realizing that in many places around the world, it’s not coming back.

According to a recent report from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), over half (52%) of surveyed U.S. workers would choose to permanently work from home on a full-time basis if given the option. Companies are aligned, too. According to a CEO benchmarking report from the Predictive Index, an overwhelming 97% of companies will allow remote work in some form moving forward.

The future is clear: Technology has moved humanity away from the traditional office and back into homes across the nation and globe. And as we look ahead, that means big changes for organizations and HR teams seeking to attract top talent.

Challenge #1: Everyone is on a level playing field—making competition fierce.

The virus was never confined by geographic borders, and neither is talent in a virtual world. Unsurprisingly, many people have no desire to return to the office full-time, which means they no longer need to live close to it. Many are moving to more desirable geographies, becoming digital nomads and making themselves available to work virtually from anywhere.

The good news is this: The expanding world is now your resource pool—you can find great candidates in places you never looked before. This is especially helpful if you’re looking for difficult-to-hire roles, like high performing SaaS sales professionals or technical people.

The problem is, your competition wants the same top talent you do, which means you may need to sharpen your skills.

Best practices:

  • Use smart data and analytics to help you establish competitive compensation packages in local markets. Great candidates are receiving plenty of outreach and offers, so your compensation and benefit offerings need to be on par with your competitors.
  • Be creative with your total compensation package. Even if your salary isn’t the highest, a candidate may prefer your benefits. Many candidates want higher quality of life, so they’re highly interested in work flexibility, PTO, Glassdoor ratings and company culture.

Challenge #2: Finding diverse candidates has gotten tougher.
In today’s world, workplace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) don’t simply increase your bottom line. DEI is also imperative to building a strong employer brand and attracting the best employees. But finding top, diverse talent is not always easy.

Best practices:

  • Use talent heat-mapping. Team up with a partner with heat-mapping technology to help you locate diverse talent, identify skills gaps, and become more cost-effective in your efforts.
  • Use analytics to uncover bias in screening. Rely on cutting-edge analytics technology to identify bias in talent screening, reconsider job requirements, and identify jobs that don’t attract diverse candidates.
  • Make sure diversity shows up clearly in your employer brand. If candidates with different, marginalized backgrounds look at your organization and don’t see themselves represented, it can be a problem. If you are not attracting the people you want, take a hard look at what you’re putting out there.

Challenge #3: Many people are gun-shy about making a move.
In light of recent layoffs and furloughs, many employees became hesitant to leave their current roles. Today, this talent needs more incentive to feel comfortable moving. And if you are a company that had layoffs, you’ll have an even tougher time attracting talent.

Best practice:

  • Make sure you’ve got a strong employer brand. This is perhaps the most important element in attracting, hiring, and retaining great talent. Equally critical, make sure your recruiting team knows how to communicate that brand story. Enlist outside training, if necessary. It’s that important.

Challenge #4: A great brand is not enough—recruiters need to offer high-touch communication.
In today’s world, old-school recruiting simply doesn’t work. You can’t expect good results from blasting an email template. Your communication needs to be very personal and specific.

Best practice:

  • Take a high-touch, communicative approach throughout the hiring process. Plan to have more focused, personalized conversations, even through SMS texting. Be well-versed in how to promote your brand, what sets you apart and the top reasons a candidate would want to work for you. This is also true for decline notifications (especially for mid-to-higher-level positions). Don’t send a blanket email. Candidates want to know why they didn’t make the cut.

Challenge #5: Recruiting teams need new skills and resources.
Talent acquisition today is a whole new ball game—and your recruiting teams may need to learn new skills to pivot successfully.

Best practices:

  • Take advantage of outside resources to augment your team. The right partner can serve as a temporary extension of your team, providing the reporting tools, new techniques, offering recruitment training, and solving other pain points. They can also help coach your team on the latest recruiting techniques and new brand initiatives.
  • Harness the power of data technology. Align with a partner who uses artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies to pull candidate profiles, candidate move history and diversity profiles.
  • Evaluate your team’s recruiting processes. They may be stuck doing what they’ve always done (but not getting the results you need). Investing in training could make smart sense.

The State of Big Data and Analytics

As the hype of big data and analytics enhances, making analytics a booming market, many organizations are utilizing data to facilitate digital transformation throughout every aspect of their organization. While businesses across every industry increase in size, companies are faced with an influx of data at their disposal. Now, organizations continuously seek a solution that alleviates the pain of obtaining and reporting workforce data from multiple, disparate HR and non-HR systems.

To improve efficiencies across the entire organization, companies need good, quality data to improve the accuracy of their analytics.

So, how can this be solved? By employing advanced analytics to convert big data into knowledge and action. Yet, how are organizations using data analytics to inform and improve strategic and operational decisions?

Below are a few statistics showing how applying analytics can unearth new insights, control organizational costs, increase profitability, and manage talent.

Big Data and Analytics Statistics You Need to Know

  • In HR.com’s recent Big Data and Analytics 2019 survey, most HR professionals give low grades to their organization in terms of its overall ability to gather, evaluate, visualize, and share high-quality talent analytics​.
    • Only 36% of HR professionals say their firms are either good (23%) or very good (13%) in these areas.
  • Few HR professionals use talent-oriented reports or dashboards to a great extent.
    • Just 26% use ​descriptive talent analytics​ to a high or very high extent.
    • Even fewer (15%) use ​predictive talent analytics​ to the same extent.
    • Fewer yet (14%) use ​prescriptive talent analytics​.
  • Talent analytics are most important in five key functional areas:
    • Compensation (50%)
    • Recruitment and selection (43%)
    • Organizational development (42%)
    • Retention (36%)
    • Succession planning (33%)
  • In HR.com’s recent Big Data and Analytics 2019 survey, only 22% of HR professionals say they often or always integrate non-HR data with HR data, though one-third (33%) sometimes integrate these types of data.
  • Three practices are cited most widely as being useful for improving talent analytics:
    • Consistent and regular collection of data
    • Turning data into insights
    • Sharing data or knowledge with others
  • Only 9% of individuals strongly agree that research designs help get the most value out of talent analytics, though another 27% moderately agree.
  • The three most widely used HR business intelligence or analytics solutions are:
    • Spreadsheet software (50%)
    • Analytics tools built into HRIS/HCMS (38%)
    • Analytics tools built into other HR systems such as an ATS (30%)
  • Most HR professionals consider these resources as the best solutions to present talent analytics:
    • Graphical presentations (i.e., PowerPoint)
    • Spreadsheets (45%)
    • Interactive visualizations (34%)
    • In HR.com’s recent Big Data and Analytics 2019 survey, only 23% of HR departments agree or strongly agree their organization has implemented a big data platform that is delivering actionable insights.
  • More than two-thirds of enterprises using big data initiatives have seen a decrease in operational expenses. (Leftronic, 2019)
  • About 40% of businesses say they need to manage unstructured data frequently (Forbes, 2019)
  • Businesses using big data saw a 10% reduction in overall costs. (Entrepreneur, 2019)
  • 97.2% of organizations are investing in big data and AI. (Business Wire, 2018)
  • By 2020, 80% of organizations will initiate deliberate competency development in the field of data literacy. (Gartner, 2018)

Without big data and analytics, it will be hard for organizations to achieve organizational efficiency and drive change without a data-driven approach. By utilizing analytics, companies can help managers develop a new mindset to inspire a new set of behaviors and explain how data influences different styles of decision making and how others can engage with data.

Want to learn more about how you can leverage the power of big data and analytics into your organization’s processes? Book a consultation with one of our experts to learn more.

10 Preliminary Findings from Big Data and Analytics 2019. (2019). 10 Preliminary Findings from Big Data and Analytics 2019.

Can Predictive Analytics Really Help With Employee Retention?

Employee retention tells a lot about a company. A high retention rate shows employees are engaged, motivated, and enjoy their jobs. When employees give good reviews on websites like Glassdoor, it shows candidates your open roles are worth fighting for. With high retention rates, the company also benefits from higher productivity, better quality work, and lower turnover. So, what would you say if we told you predictive analytics could help you increase your retention rate?

At the Risk of Human Error

Often, businesses complete a company-wide satisfaction survey to try and gauge engagement. However, the results of these surveys rely heavily on participants’ honesty. When a whopping 48% of employees think that such studies are not an accurate reflection of the company, it’s safe to say participants are telling management what they want to hear. This data set can be thought of as compromised.

Take control of your company’s retention rate by removing employee emotions and false information. Instead, leverage the data you already have on your employees. Take note of demographics. Also, take into account company factors like benefits, pay & promotions, paid time off, sick days used, and more. Take out the employees’ attitude towards the job, as well as any false information portrayed in surveys by looking at factual data. The data should speak for itself without emotions getting in the way.

Once you’ve gathered information, the analyst will identify patterns in your data. The analyst will identify correlations in both your turnover and retention. For instance, are employees who live within a five-mile radius from the office apt to stay with the company longer than those who live farther away? Are employees who have received a hefty holiday bonus more likely to stay with the company than those who have received a smaller annual bonus? When properly analyzed, the correlations between demographics will give you valuable insights.

Leverage Your Pre-existing Demographic Data

In contrast to the option above, your company can utilize people analytics too, like PREDICTIVEHR. By integrating your disparate Human Resources technologies with our analytics software, you’ll skip the busy work of collecting, normalizing, and cleaning data. Our easy-to-use collaborative software will pull this information straight from the original sources and provide you with correlations in both your turnover and retention. Our powerhouse software will become your single source of truth.

By providing real-time, interactive Lenses, it allows companies to move away from stale, point-in-time spreadsheets.

Using Analytics to Increase Employee Engagement and Employee Retention

Whether you choose to use a human analyst or predictive AI, the next step is the same. Before getting started on a plan of action, give your management team the tools and support to understand the insights the data has provided. Explain to each individual how the information was conceived and what it means for their department or sector.

Then, gather for a strategic planning meeting where each person will outline the low-hanging fruit as well as the essential projects that are a must for their sector. Use the data-driven insights to develop an action plan.

Perhaps employees with dependents on their health insurance take more paid time off than those without dependents. Consider flexible work, personal time, or work from home opportunities to allow them the option to make up hours after appointments, child sporting events, or when daytime care falls through. If employees stay at a company three years longer when they get an end of the year bonus, consider allocating money into the budget to retain these knowledgeable, worthwhile employees.

Only 20% of employees think their managers will act upon survey results. Prove them wrong by actively making changes. Communicate where you got the data to make these decisions. Whether you’re using AI or have an outsourced team to help you make strategic decisions, your team should know you’re not making changes just to throw a wrench in everyone’s day. This transparency will not only let them know actions are being taken but also that the company values employee retention.

Predictive analytics can play a significant role in employee engagement and employee retention. Take control of your company by leveraging the data you have. With emotions removed from the equation, factual data can be analyzed to see trends. Use the delivered insights to improve engagement, retention, and, in turn, business. Discover how PredictiveHR’s people analytics software will identify valuable business insights for your company when you book a free demo.

Unraveling Your Data: The Importance of Data Collection and Normalization for Powerful Insights [Webinar Recap]

Missed our webinar? No worries. Watch the recording of Adrienne Occhino’s webinar and find out how data collection and normalization of employee data can provide you valuable insights.

In HR.com’s recent Big Data and Analytics survey, almost 50% of respondents identified data collection or data clean up was “difficult” or “fairly difficult.” If not presented the right tools to gather data efficiently, how can organizations identify their HR needs or pain points and solve them? Without the proper cleansing and normalization of workforce data, HR managers aren’t able to uncover common attributes that are affecting their workforce and develop responsive initiatives based on their data.

On October 30, Predictive’s very own Adrienne Occhino, VP of Strategic Consulting, teamed up with HR.com to discuss the importance of how cleansing and normalizing employee data can deliver powerful insights to organizations. From discussing problems that arise with unclean data, solutions, and steps to cleansing data, Adrienne provided actionable ways that tools such as people analytics, can do to cleanse and strengthen the use of workforce data. To access HR.com’s webinar, you’ll find a link to the webinar below. Enjoy!

Watch the webinar recording here!

Are Your Employees Leaving? Discover Why with People Analytics

If organizations are passionate about one thing, it’s their people. Yet, as an influx of people continues to join the workforce, it can be hard to keep others from changing or leaving their job. According to a study, about 51% of employees are looking to leave their current positions. So, how can organizations get ahead and minimize their employee turnover problem? People analytics is the answer.

With voluntary resignations at an all-time high, adhering to employee retention has been the objective for many organizations. To actively uncover insight into how to alleviate employee turnover, organizations need more in-depth analysis. How? By addressing the real causes of turnover and how it affects different parts of the organization. Businesses worldwide use people analytics to help them assess critical factors affecting employee turnover. The integration of people analytics into any organization offers significant insights and benefits. Also, it allows businesses to make more informed and impactful workforce decisions. So, how can people analytics help improve your bottom line?

Five Key Employee Turnover Statistics

We all know turnover is a problem, but how big is it?

Did you know:

What are the common drivers of employee turnover in the U.S.?

  • Personal/Family (57%)
  • Promotion Opportunity (35%)
  • Career Change (27%)
  • Base Salary (24%)
  • Job Satisfaction (24%)

How to Support Employee Decisions with People Analytics

For most organizations, voluntary turnover can cost millions of dollars. To stay ahead of the game, organizations need to establish proactive retention tactics and apply them throughout the entire company. How? By utilizing an analytical approach, such as people analytics, to identify flight risk factors and leverage the power of data to drive action.

  1. Identify the Problem. Determine the leading causes of high turnover to assess if there’s significant damage already done. Utilize metrics such as:
    1. Resignation rate: Identify which segments are resigning. Is it your top performers, senior leadership, or managers?
    2. Business metrics: People analytics provides a bigger picture of how employee turnover affects your business, helping you to make proactive action faster.
  2. Uncover the root causes of turnover. Now that you know there’s a turnover problem, people analytics can dig deeper to help you find why your employees are leaving.
    1. Key drivers: Perform a thorough analysis to determine which factors increase and decrease turnover reformat retention strategies with insights, rather than intuition.
    2. Uncover correlations: Determine how employee turnover affects categories such as compensation, promotions, pay increases, performance, and training opportunities. With insights at hand, managers can support their decisions around enhancing developmental opportunities, benefits, and promotions, to manage costs, and retain the right people.
  3. Recognize which groups are experiencing turnover. Remember, not all turnover is bad. With people analytics, HR teams and professionals can assess which groups experience turnover, whether that be your low-performers or high-performers, and evaluate the impact employee resignation has on the business.
    1. Evaluate workforce attributes. Analyze who’s at risk of leaving from crucial characteristics such as location, role, age, diversity, performance, and more.
    2. Risk of exit. People analytics allows organizations to predict employees at risk of leaving before they turn in their resignation letter. PredictiveHR supplies managers with an at-a-glance view of analytics and reporting to identify issues before they arise with powerful, visual, and predictive tools.
  4. Design an impactful employee retention program. After you’ve recognized issues that are causing employee turnover, you can direct your focus on creating an employee retention program to retain key individuals in your organization.
    1. Internal Mobility.  Assess and review employee’s skills and attributes to identify which internal candidates you want to hire for specific roles within your organization before recruiting candidates. HR managers can also look externally to see what other positions are being filled and hire candidates according to the demands of the labor market. PredictiveHR can help identify each risk factor to determine which candidates you want to hire for new opportunities within the organization.
    2. Provide more promotions. Are employees leaving due to the lack of advancement opportunities? By assessing the percentage of people promoted from the organization they worked at, during the start of their reviewal period, will allow organizations to gauge which employees deserve a promotion.
    3. Performance on new hires. New hire performance can give you insight into how effectively new talent is adapting and performing in the workplace and if your onboarding program needs improvement.
    4. Pinpoint recruitment trends. Data on past and present recruitment strategies and workforce planning can help HR teams improve L&D programs to ensure staff members have the necessary skills to perform or take over other roles within.

Reducing employee turnover can’t be solved when businesses are still operating from multiple, disparate systems or still utilizing spreadsheets to manage their workforce. Not only does this create a scattered, unorganized process, but it makes it difficult to assess what’s going on in your workforce. So, what’s the right solution to help you? PredictiveHR is the answer.

At PredictiveHR, we provide companies the right investment into workforce analytics with our CHRO Executive Lens, which allows companies to have the right workforce intelligence to alleviate employee turnover. With ongoing support and HR expertise from our staff, we help HR professionals understand their workforce, predict talent trends, reduce turnover, and focus on top talent.

If you’re ready to learn more about how PredictiveHR can drive better workforce decisions throughout your company, schedule a demo with us today!

3 Key Considerations for Successful Use of Data & People Analytics

People analytics has finally arrived in HR, but use of analytics is still rudimentary and not evenly distributed. That much was clear at the 2019 People Analytics & Workforce Planning Conference in Miami on May 5th-7th. HR leaders, vendors and partners in the HR space gathered to discuss the challenges of people management and potential tools and solutions to those challenges through the application of people analytics.

An important topic on the minds of many at the conference was how to aggregate and normalize data to extract insight. In our conversations with attendees, we found that the majority were struggling with inconsistent data and data living in multiple systems within their organization. In addition to inconsistent data, most admitted that they didn’t have a people analytics strategy in place. Although the goal was to learn how to leverage data and derive insights, the lack of a clear strategy and clean data are apparent hurdles for leaders and practitioners in HR.

With the unemployment rate being extremely low and with the current rate of attrition increasing across all industry sectors, it’s essential for HR to tackle the data issue in order to fully leverage people analytics data and bring quantifiable value to the business. How can they go about doing this?

Here are three key questions HR leaders should consider to start off right with data and people analytics:

1. How is your data quality and how many sources of data do you have?

Before adopting analytics, it’s important to understand the quality of data available in your organization as well as the different sources and types of data. When it comes to data, more is not necessarily better if the quality is poor. Since data is what powers the analytics, clean data will give you more accurate results to your questions, making your insights more useful. This is particularly important when you want to use data to derive metrics that will form the basis for critical business decisions.

2. What answers are you looking for in the data?

Just as important as data quality is knowing what to look for in the data. Although it may be tempting to pull different types to data, visualize the data, and see what the data says, a more effective approach is to know what questions you need answers to and have a strategy on how to get those answers from the data. Having a strategy will make your process of using data more efficient and will allow you to learn and improve on your use of data as you progress.

3. What is the business growth strategy?

Knowing the organization’s growth strategy will allow you to plan and scale resources accordingly to meet the needs of the business. This will require you not only to understand current competencies of employees in the organization but also predict the type and level of skills needed in the future. Having the appropriate tools to unlock the necessary data to get that information will go a long way in helping you bring tremendous value to the organization. Instead of falling behind in hiring and not having the resources to support growth, you can be a step ahead of business needs and be ready to supply the company with the right talent and better utilize your internal talent!

At PredictiveHR, we understand the importance of aggregating and normalizing data no matter the condition of the data. PHR strives to provide innovative tools and solutions to help our clients stay ahead of the curve. Our differentiator lies in the fact that our solution has an integrity engine – an AI tool – that will bring all data from disparate systems into one and normalize it. If there is a distortion in the data, we will fix it. This gives you peace of mind knowing that the underlying data is trustworthy. Additionally, our platform pushes you to take a step further in your analysis – right down to the people – to know who is going to leave and why. This capability allows you to be dynamic in your decision making and gives you the flexibility you need in your workforce planning.

To see how PredictiveHR can help you start your people analytics journey or advance your people analytics strategy, check out our products and solutions.

Military Veteran Talent Development Under the Watchful Eye of Predictive Analytics

Military Veteran Talent Development Under the Watchful Eye of Predictive Analytics

The Moral Imperative is Now the Business Imperative:

By Jesse Canella, CEO – Military Talent Group and David Pollard, Chairman – PredictiveHR

As we continue into 2019, we will see a growing industry-wide shift taking place in the talent market that is driving new business strategy. With an overall projection of 20.5 million jobs that will be created by 2020 and the labor force growth rate slated to decline this year  (Jobs Outlook), employers are now even more challenged in competing to attract and retain top talent. This shift has pushed employers to rethink their talent strategies to pursue a forward-thinking approach that will enable them to stay ahead of their competitors. Looking at the trends now taking place in the talent acquisition and human capital management space, we now see two major initiatives:  a focus on more comprehensive diversity and inclusion programs, and the integration of new HR technologies.

The Impact of Diversity & Inclusion on Businesses.

According to a report issued by Deloitte, “Leading organizations now see diversity and inclusion as a comprehensive strategy woven into every aspect of the talent life cycle to enhance employee engagement, improve brand, and drive performance.” Diversity programs will continue to evolve, and so will an increased focus on a hyper-diverse group of high ROI job candidates such as military veterans.

Military veterans represent a uniquely skilled and finite segment of talent with approximately 200,000 military service members transitioning to the civilian labor force each year.  Veterans now rank as a Top 3 priority to American businesses, and 90% of HR professionals and hiring managers feel veteran recruitment is essential to their businesses. The business case for hiring veterans has been well established and has driven employer demand for this segment of the talent pool.

However, recruiting and retaining military veterans is challenging. While many companies now have military veteran employment initiatives in place, a majority of them are struggling to achieve desired results. In fact, only 7% of the Fortune 500 are satisfied, or very satisfied with their veteran hiring program.

The reason: Traditional recruiting, hiring, and onboarding processes do not allow organizations to compete for and appropriately place a veteran candidate in the right job. In fact, the number one reason why 43% of veterans leave their first post-military job within a year is due to job misalignment.

A successful military veteran program requires a strong foundation that runs much deeper than just recruiting. It needs a phased-approach that begins with organizational planning and preparation to deploy the right applications, processes, and tools required to execute effectively and maximize business impact. However, most companies today do not have a clear picture of the number of veterans they already have employed, and lack of data on their current military workforce performance and the individual needs that may cause roadblocks for their military talent to reach full potential.

The Impact of Big Data & Predictive HR Analytics on Veteran Programs.

Building the right military talent strategy must first start with a comprehensive analysis and understanding of an organization’s current workforce and the overarching business objectives. When military programs are not wrapped around organizational needs and goals, they often result in performance decline, poor employee experience, and costly turnover.

The first step any business should take is to implement a basic analytics technology that can organize workforce data to baseline the current situation and identify the veterans that are currently employed. Once the organization can look at their veteran population discretely, patterns and gaps will be revealed that will drive the development of program strategy and the proper action plans that align to the business’s goals.

•    Which groups of veterans are currently operating at a high level?  What attributes and experiences do they have in common?

•    What military and post-military training and experiences were those veterans exposed to that assisted them in their high performance?

•    Can we replicate that experience that led to high performance in other veterans who may have missed out on such exposure?

•    What overall patterns should we look for in our hiring process to both identify immediate top performers and, much more importantly, those that with exposure to training and experience will themselves become high performers?

Predictive analytics technology can play a vital role in this base lining exercise providing, for the first time in many cases, visibility into the value and opportunities that a focus on military talent reveals. This data-driven approach is the only way for an organization to accurately measure the growth of their military program and its impact on the business.

Once the analytics platform is established, and all veterans (and any other class of employee for that matter) are in the system, then the power of the analytics tool begins.

As the analytics platform reveals specific patterns and cause and effect relationships, immediate action plans can spring into action.

•    Targeted training should be provided to fill any gaps within the organization to ensure the understanding of military experience, practical skills translation and matching, and industry best practices. This approach is required to properly prepare the entire organization to have the greatest success with their military program.

•    Improved hiring profiles can be established to target veteran with specific configurations of life, military, and work experience.

•    Untapped pockets of military talent, overlooked by other employers but that possess the trainable gaps can be targeted.  Here is where solving the moral imperative becomes a competitive business advantage.

Moving forward, the analytics platform gets smarter and smarter.  Machine learning will organize the data and make it more intelligent as new information comes in.  New patterns, gaps, and opportunities can be revealed. New veteran leaders will emerge with other attributes and correlations that can be tied together back into the baseline to feed the hiring and employee development programs.

This is not a static one-time exercise, but rather a living breathing strategy. We are just barely scratching the surface of the potential of these types of programs to maximize all human potential, and that data will reveal a wealth of value to be tapped into for the company and the people involved.

Smart organizations will, over time, realize that by weaving veterans into the fabric of their organizations while leveraging big data analytics, creates the greatest reciprocal success and satisfaction rates that benefit the employer and military veterans, alike.

This approach will provide a significant competitive advantage in an already overheated labor market, which is forecasted to get much more severe in the years to come.

Using Workforce Planning to Deliver Competitive Advantage

In today’s tight labor market where matching talent and outcomes has become critical for achieving high levels of performance, an organization’s workforce is arguably its most important asset. Indeed, organizations routinely exclaim that their people are their most important asset. However, very few businesses carefully plan, measure, or optimize this all-important resource.

Too many organizations don’t know of the current workforce gaps that will limit their ability to execute against their business strategy. The main cause of this disconnect between the recognition of the value of the workforce and the management of this resource is a lack of agreed objectives regarding what the output of workforce planning should be and a lack of a workforce planning process that includes predictive workforce modeling.

The main goal of workforce planning is to ensure that talent supply is equal to or greater than talent demand. If you want to execute your strategic plan, you need to have the right people in the right seats to deliver. So what outputs from workforce planning activities should the business expect?

Some benefits we want to achieve include:

  1. Knowing what headcount is required to execute the strategic plan, and specifically what talent will be required.
  2. Knowing what talent demand and supply issues currently exist in different areas of the organization (line of business, location, function, etc.).
  3. Knowing what impact management decisions and priorities will have on future workforce investments.
  4. Understanding what issues impact employee productivity.
  5. Determining the best metrics for understanding the risks concerning talent across the business.
  6. Providing accurate, real-time reports on workforce planning results.
  7. Creating a plan to be proactive, instead of reactive, when it comes to talent management.

Deploying a Workforce Analytics (people analytics) solution will enable you to gather and analyze data from across your organization to provide information for your workforce planning process. Using this information, you’ll be able to determine the real demand required by your strategic plan, understand what workforce supply already exists inside your organization, and design a forward-looking plan for bridging any gaps that might exist.

Understanding Talent Demand

Typically, organizations task an individual or small “center of expertise” to look at the business’s plan and draw up workforce requirements for the different areas of the organization. The problem with working this way is that the future is uncertain. No matter what plan an organization has in place, the rate and extent of success or failure in different areas of the organization are somewhat unpredictable.

For example, according to Peter Cappelli in his research on workforce planning, “The error rate in the U.S. on a one-year forecast of demand at the stock-keeping unit (SKU) code or individual product level, for example, is over 30 percent.”

There are two key components to avoiding this approach and the reactive stance it generates. The first step is to understand that workforce planning is a process, not a project with a “plan” as the outcome. Workforce planning is an ongoing process that takes the ever-changing state of the reality of the business into account and compares it to the strategic plan and expectations.

The second step is to implement technologies like People Analytics (such as the PredictiveHR platform) that provide users real-time and accurate information on the current state of the organization and provides predictive capabilities. Not only can analysis take place as part of a regular process, but ad hoc analysis can also provide critical information every time the state of the business changes due to internal or external circumstances.

Understanding Workforce Supply

In addition to understanding and predicting changing needs to your workforce requirements, you’ll need to keep abreast of your current workforce supply to meet those needs. Much like with planning, most organizations approach their future workforce supply stance by carrying forward historic trends when it comes to turnover, retirement, and internal job movement – and possibly take into account industry benchmarks.

Not only is this method inaccurate when it comes to total workforce supply, but it also doesn’t take the performance of individuals in the organization at all. That is, even if you’re lucky enough to have an internal workforce supply to fill all of your seats, you may not have the right people to fill the jobs in terms of competencies and performance.

As with predicting demand, People Analytics tools should be used to bring predictability to both the number and makeup of your organization’s workforce supply. Good People Analytics tools take into account a wide variety of data and apply Artificial Intelligence to that data to conduct complex analysis incorporating demographics, organizational actions, workplace conditions, and much more to predict how groups, and individuals, may be impacted and the effect it will have on your internal workforce supply.

Action Planning

Once you know where there are likely to be gaps between your workforce demand and supply, you can create a framework for and ongoing workforce planning process. Since using People Analytics tools provide detailed and individualize intelligence, you can create a more detailed and targeted approach than the typical business.

Most organizations focus on general hiring, retention, and develop programs to bridge any perceived challenge they may face in the future. Organizations that enjoy the predictive analytics available in People Analytics tools can proactively target recruitment based on accurate career transition information, target development programs to specific areas or individuals who would most benefit, and fine tune pay strategy and bonus programs to enhance retention. Even promotions, transfers, and reorgs can be planned in advance to take advantage of your current supply – putting talented, capable, and engaged employees in roles that leverage their highest value.

Using the right tools, businesses can achieve an advantage over their competition by better managing the most important resource in every organization – the workforce.

What is People Analytics?

The Historical Approach to People Analytics: Relying on Instinct

For hundreds of years – possibly longer – organizations have made critical HR decisions based largely on instinct and intuition. Where should we find talent for our business? What’s the best way to attract those people? What kinds of benefits and perks should we offer to keep them? What kind of training and develop should we use, who should we offer it to, and what are the results? All of these critical questions, and many more, were often answered based on gut feelings and anecdotal experience.

The Shift to Data-Driven HR

Over the last couple of decades, human resources departments have increasingly accessed internal data and analyzed HR performance. It’s true that businesses should know how much they are spending on human resources and learning and development programs. We should also know what kind of value we’re delivering from that spend. This information is useful to gauge the performance of HR departments, and is interesting to senior HR managers and their managers. However, it doesn’t provide much value to sales, marketing, and operations managers.

By definition, this information is comprised solely of lagging indicators. It tells us about the past – it offers no information for the future. The executive suite is highly interested in leading indicators – information that can help predict the future and help shape strategy.

Nowadays, organizations have access to troves of data surrounding the people they’ve hired and the performance they’ve delivered. We know where people are from, where they went to school, where they’ve worked in the past, and for how long. We know details about people’s work environments – what office they sit in and who manages them. We have information from exit interviews on why people have quit.

We also have tons of data on the performance of individuals and teams. Who are the organization’s top sales people? Where have there been the most operational failures? How does the performance of employees who have been trained differ from their colleagues who haven’t?

Empowering HR with People Analytics

By accessing and analyzing all of this data, HR departments can both report on results, and help predict what should be done to improve performance – increase revenues, decrease costs, reduce the time to market, etc. People analytics enable HR departments to provide this critical information, thereby elevating the value of the entire HR function in the organization.

People analytics tools are increasingly being adopted to help human resources access and analyze both internal and external data and provide strategic insights to the executive suite. These tools combine multiple technologies like Big Data analytics and Artificial Intelligence to slice and dice data, and present real-time representations of the information that is most interesting to the organization.

Diverse Applications of People Analytics

For example, you can set up dashboards to better understand attrition, employee cost, and employee engagement by business unit or geography. You can generate up-to-the-minute reports to see patterns around operational outcomes (time to market, patient outcomes, etc.) and how management issues influenced results. Or you might better pinpoint sales training solutions and improve sales hiring quality based on analysis of sales performance by demographics, territory, and education.

You can also use People Analytics tools to protect your business from fraud or ensure regulatory compliance. By analyzing internal data, HR can find patterns of fraud, and ensure that hiring, training, and management practices can significantly reduce the initiation and impact of fraudulent activity. You can also analyze employee demographic and salary information to ensure that you comply with equal pay regulations.

Like contemporary CRM and Business Intelligence tools, many People Analytics tools have become simple to learn and use. Deploying such a tool enables HR departments to immediately provide strategically valuable information to the executive suite, and consistently roll-out additional value to the organization as executives come to rely on the HR function.